“You don’t find the right person. You become the right person.” — Leo Buscaglia, Ph.D. (“Dr. Love”)

Most songs that are recorded seem to be about love and romantic relationships. They’re about how wonderful it is because we’ve finally found “that special someone” or because we’ve either got — or lost — the greatest love the world has ever known. 

We spend loads of time, energy and money on finding a “perfect partner.” Yet for many of us, relationship problems create no end of grief and pain. They distract us, make us depressed or anxious. They interfere with our jobs, and can send us to the most horribly painful places we’ve ever known, especially when those relationships end but it wasn’t of our own choosing.

After spending ages aching and hurting over the whole miserable fiasco, we dive in again, looking for yet another “perfect love.” Sometimes, we do that almost right away…never a great idea but the desire for love can be outrageously strong.

However, there’s a difficult truth about relationships that many people do not know — or refuse to believe.

The reality of our relationships is that they are only ever as healthy as we are, emotionally speaking. Our relationships act as mirrors, showing us exactly what it is that we need to heal in ourselves. 

But we don’t see this. All we know is that we’re up to our necks in unmet needs, hurt feelings and crushing disappointment.

The word “health” has the word “heal” in it. In the case of relationships, you can use “healed” or “unhealed” instead of “healthy” or “unhealthy” because a healthy relationship involves both partners being well on their way to healing their emotional wounds.

We’ve all got them; we can’t sail through life without scars left by some bully on a playground, a teacher that enjoyed publicly embarrassing students, the emotional or physical abandonment by a parent, or heaven knows what else. 

They are especially significant when they come from our main relationships growing up, the family dynamics in our environments. These can set us up to have complicated emotional issues that we keep playing out in our own relationships and with our children.

Until we’re aware of the damage that has been inflicted on us and how it’s impacting our lives, we will keep repeating the same unresolved issues.

Generally, we think we’re pretty much okay to live with. Sure, we have our faults and our old mistakes (or at least, we will often say this but do we really believe that? Could we list them??). We’ve probably got a laundry list of poor choices that may haunt us, but look at any personal ad or online dating profile and you’ll see what people think of themselves. You get the usual assortment of stuff like “great sense of humour, fun-loving, sensitive, caring, romantic,” blah blah blah.😝

But they don’t tell you “Traumatised by years of abuse, no idea how to stand up for myself, no sense of boundaries, and I let my family control my every thought and choice.” 

They don’t say, “I’m controlling, selfish, rigid, disrespectful when angry, and foul-tempered when I don’t get my own way. Oh, and all of that will be your fault.”

And most definitely, they never say, “I will spend more time expecting you to fulfill my various emotional needs than doing anything about trying to meet yours. And when we argue, I’ll keep talking about how you never do things for me and I won’t ever consider that I haven’t done much for you.”

People who are living such lives as these cannot possibly attract emotionally healthy, stable, healed partners.

Firstly, those who are well along the path of healing their emotional wounds are not going to be remotely interested in dealing with these kinds of unhealthy behaviours and attitudes. 

Secondly, people in such a dysfunctional place aren’t going to have a clue how to deal with someone who has solid boundaries and a strong sense of self-love and respect. It is impossible for such a relationship to work.

So how do we get to that happy place of healthy relationship?

It begins with the single most important relationship you have — your relationship with yourself. It begins with examining your own unhealthy patterns, flaws and weaknesses. It begins with recognising your own emotional wounds and learning how they have impacted all of your relationships in the past.

The keys to healing the damage from years gone by are self-awareness and understanding. The goal is to achieve a deep sense of self-love and self-respect. 

Then — and only then — will you have a chance at a healthy romantic relationship because you will no longer be playing out all of your unresolved issues. You won’t be acting on unmet needs or expecting others to make you feel whole, happy or complete.

Another Significant Challenge

One of the biggest problems in relationships is in not understanding the difference between relationship issues and individual issues. More often than not, the problems between a couple are really individual issues, i.e. problems caused by the “emotional baggage” that has come from their life experience. This “baggage” will be reflected in the relationship, but they are not about the relationship.

An unexamined life (i.e. those individual issues that we bring to our relationships) will continue to wreak havoc, with various long-ago-but-still-present wounds throwing a spanner into every relationship, sabotaging attempts to find a healthy, loving partner. It can be a terrifying thing to delve into the murky depths of our psyches and see what nastiness is crawling around in the dark and erupting under the cloak of a relationship gone wrong — when it has no possible chance to go right.

Those “mirrors” never lie. Our relationships will always reflect back to us exactly where we need healing. The first step is to uncover what the issues are. The second step is to do something about resolving them.

If you are not currently in a relationship and think you could use a boost along your path of healing, I can highly recommend Dr Phil McGraw’s book, “Self Matters”. Whether or not you like him, this book is like one-stop shopping for anyone who wants to take a serious look at those murky depths and get rid of the monsters, once and for all.

If you are in a relationship that is struggling, Dr Phil has also written “Relationship Rescue,” which is brilliant beyond words. With loads of “cut to the chase” information and great exercises to do, even if your partner doesn’t want to do the book with you, it can still be of tremendous benefit because it makes you look at yourself. It makes you see how you’re contributing to the relationship problems. It forces you to contemplate your own life experience, behaviours, attitudes — and your partner’s as well, which can make a big difference to your own happiness, whether you stay in the relationship or not.

And whether or not you choose to use either of these books, or find help from other sources, the bottom line is the same. Unless and until you examine your own life and analyse who you are and what makes you tick, and then consciously work toward healing the broken bits, your relationships will only be as healthy (or unhealthy) as you are.

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For your own healing journey, click here for a remote healing session (by donation) with me.

Spiritual Arts Mentor and Master Teacher, Liberty Forrest, guides you in discovering who you are, why you’re here, and how to follow that path.

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